


Now More Than Ever

by Canon_Is_Relative



Category: The West Wing
Genre: First Kiss, Inauguration night, M/M, Memories
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-24
Updated: 2018-04-24
Packaged: 2019-04-27 09:10:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,376
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14422182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Canon_Is_Relative/pseuds/Canon_Is_Relative
Summary: It’s inauguration night and Josh is looking at Sam.





	Now More Than Ever

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to my amazing TWW bestie ImpishTubist for the beta as well as for the many delightful Sam-and-Josh discussions we’ve had over the years, including the one that inspired this piece.

There was a light knock on the doorframe and then there was Sam stepping through into the low light and closing the door behind him. Josh hadn’t stopped grinning all day, realizing it only after real night started to fall and his face started to hurt. He’d ducked away from the crowd then, his feet taking him down the hall to the door that had his name on it. Really, it did, and not just on a paper print-out; from now on when he needed a minute he wouldn’t be running away, he’d be _Going to his office._ He met Sam’s eyes and saw his own expression mirrored in the incandescent look on Sam’s face.

There was something about seeing Sam in a new place, Josh thought, under the unfamiliar light of an unfamiliar lamp, that made Josh feel like he was seeing him for the first time. Which was stupid; he remembered the first time he saw Sam like he had the moment on an old tape he could take out and replay whenever he wanted. And that was his second stupid thought in as many minutes; there was nothing special about Josh, _everyone_ who met Sam and spent more than five minutes with him remembered it. He’d been such a kid that night, though, a brash and brazen and naive kid, and Josh relished the strange kind of pride that whispered to him that no one else in this building had that for their first memory of meeting Sam.

He’d been twenty-one, Sam, working as someone’s junior assistant for the summer before he started law school. Josh was still working for his first senator back then, all of twenty-five himself, worldly and wary of anyone who seemed too happy. He’d meant to leave the party after an hour and go home and get some damn sleep but then this damn kid had showed up and somehow it was almost midnight when he next checked his watch. He could tell that Sam wasn’t trying to get drunk, didn’t realize how much he was drinking, but everyone else was drinking and refilling and talking and Sam seemed to operate on a plane that was moving just a little bit faster than everyone else and so, still riding the high of finally being able to order drinks for himself, it meant that he was heading towards wasted just that bit faster than everyone else. And then it was midnight and the bar was acquiring that strange melancholic feel when everyone who’d only come to have a good time has left and Josh realized that he and Sam had been talking without interruption for at least half an hour. And then he realized, when someone called out his name in farewell, just how close the two of them were standing and just how white Sam’s teeth were, all of them on display because he hadn’t stopped smiling once. 

Josh had known, then, with a certainty he rarely allowed himself on the subject of interpersonal relationships that involved his own person, what was going on.

“Look, kid,” he’d shifted to put his back to the room and Sam had sidled closer to him, stopping only when he nearly collided with Josh’s hastily-raised hand. “Look,” Josh repeated, licking his lips and tracking the way Sam had dropped his eyes and was slow to meet Josh’s gaze again. “You’re a great kid, really, but man, you’re drunk. I’m gonna get a cup of coffee and you’re gonna drink it and remember why you can’t look at guys like that, not here.”

“Not here?” Sam echoed, his ridiculous eyes going ridiculously wide.

“Not here. Look. My boss? Sitting in the corner over there. Your boss? He’s like three bar stools away from us.” Josh drew breath to continue but a shadow passed over Sam’s face, bringing a sudden sharp edge to the baby-roundness of his jaw, and Josh forgot what he was going to say.

“So?” Sam said, pulling himself up straighter, his eyes gone serious, their absurd blue looking almost obscene in the way they were set off by the hot flush of his cheeks. “I’m not hiding. I’m not ashamed.”

Josh snorted loudly. “Well that’s great, that’s just fantastic for you, kid, and I’d drink to your future career in politics but it would be over before I finished my beer.”

Sam’s naïveté had pissed him off, he remembered for years with perfect clarity how the wave of anger had swept through him like an unexpected blast of chill air on a summer afternoon. He also remembered how swiftly he’d regretted his words, watching as they fell like missiles on unguarded territory.

“Listen,” he’d said at once, ducking his head to try and recapture their eye contact. “It’s a game, man, you gotta know that by now. It’s all a game. The rules suck and the deck is stacked but you gotta at least respect the rules if you wanna play the game.”

The stormy look was already passing from Sam’s eyes, his mouth twisting into a grin and it was just cruel, it really was, it was a cruel joke that Mother Nature would design someone like Sam Seaborn and put him in front of Josh Lyman just then, just when things were really starting to go well for him. 

“So really,” Sam had said then, “if I were to ask you to follow me out into that alley beside the bar and once there if I were to get down on my knees and ask permission to fellate you, you’d really say no right now?”

That fucking kid. From day one — day one being that day they met twelve years ago; Sam surely had a past even then but for Josh that would always be Day One — he seemed to have a purely intuitive understanding of his own appeal. He knew how to work his charms while acting as though he’d never actually seen his own face in the mirror. He was the opposite of vain but he sure knew how to work what he didn’t seem to know he had. 

Josh had spent many long nights since wondering what would have happened if he’d called Sam’s bluff. Because he told himself that it was a bluff — no one talked like that, no one would have actually done that — and then he switched stories like an addict when he was alone or lonely or cold or bored ... but then they were on the campaign trail together and Josh learned to tell himself that there was a line; there was a line that even twenty-one-year-old Sam Seaborn would not have crossed.

It was a hard lie to sell, though. Because Sam...Sam was passion, embodied. Except when he wasn’t. Sam was Sam when he told Josh, ‘I’m not hiding, I’m not ashamed.’ Sam was also Sam when he told him that he was dating some woman and accepting a position with Gage Whitney in the same ten-minute phone call after not speaking to Josh for almost a year. And Sam was still Sam when he turned Josh’s last-ditch attempt to draw Sam back into his world into a wedding announcement. Josh couldn’t remember the girl’s name any more than the name of Sam’s law firm, but he remembered the unfamiliar Mona Lisa smile on Sam’s lips and he remembered thinking that the game was up, he’d lost. And then Sam was asking him, ‘What are you doing?’ Sam was asking him, ‘Is Hoynes the Real Thing?’ And then Josh was on the train to New Hampshire asking himself, ‘How did you ever let Sam out of your sight?’ 

And, finally, Sam was Sam when he was looking across a crowded room and mouthing words meant only for Josh. First there was, ‘Yeah?’ as Josh pointed to his own bad poker face and grinned, and then there was, ‘Thank you,’ as Josh pointed to Sam to say, ‘It’s all you,’ on the night of the Illinois primary.

They dealt in words, the two of them, they thrived in the impossible and the unfamiliar landscapes they created by placing one unexpected word after another. For all that Josh had called Sam ‘kid’ relentlessly throughout the first year of their acquaintance, neither of them had actually been children when they met. They had, though, shared a kind of childhood together; big fish in their respective big ponds of DC and Duke University, they seemed to keep finding each other. Josh remembers Sam’s law school years as a time filled with calls at all hours and conversations that seemed crystal clear in the moment and fractured into a thousand different things once he’d hung up the phone. He remembers the feeling of almost terrifying certainty that he and Sam were going to grow up and change the world. He remembers the feeling of being twins with a secret language: The Real Thing; What are you doing; Okay. 

At the same time, they weren’t the same. Not by any stretch. Josh was Josh and his Josh-ness seemed to continually piss people off at least in part because they knew they needed him. Sam was the chameleon who everyone loved and everyone knew. Josh felt sometimes like he was going nuts, feeling like he was the only one who experienced Sam as something transitory; as a person who projected utter personability but couldn’t tell you their own life story if that same life depended on it. 

So when Sam walked into the office — Josh’s office — and closed the door behind him, Josh registered a dissonance but took a minute to disseminate the windstorm of information and another minute to sit with the realization: we haven’t actually been alone together in months. 

There’d been that night just before the Illinois primary when they were both drunk on lack of sleep and the thought that the next day would make or break the idea they each had about the rest of their lives. But then the next day had killed Josh’s father and to this day he couldn’t remember how much time he’d spent away from the campaign, mourning. He didn’t think it was that long but when he returned everything had shifted. He’d fallen into bed with the newly-hired media consultant, for one thing, confiding in her one frenzied night that he felt like he was sleeping with himself because he knew Leo had hired her as a fallback in case he didn’t return. She’d had something to say to that. Mandy had something to say to everything, that was part of why Josh had loved her. Thought he loved her. Would have thought he loved anything that kept his head above water, back in those days. Knew he loved Sam when he drew what felt like his first unencumbered breath in months after Sam — not Toby and not Leo — approached him and Mandy with the ultimatum that they had to choose between the campaign and each other. 

That hadn’t been so long ago, in the grand scheme of things. Sam, being a grand-scheme-of-things kind of guy, surely had not forgotten about it but had certainly moved on from it. Recent or not, Josh’s attempt to drown himself in Mandy was a blip on the radar. And it was Sam, no one but Sam, standing in his office and grinning like his face had stuck that way and he was feeling no pain.

“I can’t believe we made it,” Josh said. “Can you believe we made it?”

“Yes.” Of course Sam could believe they’d made it. Sam could believe anything.

“Well, duh, of course we made it, but I mean look at this.” Josh turned in a slow circle, not actually looking at anything in his mock-surveillance of the office. He could turn all the way around with his arms outstretched without running into anything, it was just this side of miraculous.

Sam was laughing, that little-boy laugh he’d never grown out of despite Duke, despite Toby, despite the Governor — President — despite Josh himself...

“Come here.”

Sam blinked at him, pausing after taking the first step out of pure, habitual obedience.

“Come on, Sam.”

“I thought today of all days,” Sam said, leaning against Josh’s desk, his body a hard, warm line against Josh’s side, “I thought today of all days you’d be giving me the ‘now more than ever’ speech.”

Sam was a man now, unequivocally; he was both an adult and a man and there was no pretending this into any sort of dismissive category involving youthful folly or harmless fantasy. 

_Now more than ever_. Josh entertained a momentary thought of puffing up his chest and repeating those words, turning it into another one of their jokes. Instead he answered Sam and himself with a simple, “I don’t want to.”

He reached for Sam, helpless against the urge to glance over at the closed door. When he looked back at him, Sam was watching him through heavy-lidded eyes, and Josh would swear that they were back in that bar where none of this started.

“I don’t want to do that, Sam. Not tonight.”

“What do you want to do?” It was both that brazen boy from back then and the rational man who’d just scored the assist of a lifetime, Josh heard both of them asking that question.

“If I said I wanted to take you out to a back alley, would you go with me?”

Sam groaned, grabbing Josh by the front of his shirt and shaking him lightly. “Come on, how do you still remember that? I was such a klutz, and you didn’t even know who I was.”

“Who do you think you’re talking to, Sam, it’s me.” Josh grinned, delirious, thinking that he could pick up where he’d started all those years ago and finish counting Sam’s teeth. “I remember everything, why do you think Leo hired me?”

He’d expected Sam to say, ‘Because he knew you’d eventually get him to hire me,’ it’s what Josh would have said in his position, but instead Sam kissed him.

“Today of all days, huh?” Sam barely pulled away, their lips still brushing as he spoke.

Josh’s wandering hands at last came to rest and he pulled Sam close. “Now more than ever.”

**Author's Note:**

> If you enjoy my writing, I'd be thrilled if you'd take a minute to check out my original fiction. My first novel, 'Portrait of a Stranger,' is a sweet story of three chance encounters, two boys, and first love. Co-written with my fic-writing partner stardust_made, it will be released on December 26, 2018. You can order it [HERE](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07KVLWHF6/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1543166018&sr=1-1&keywords=Portrait+of+a+Stranger).
> 
> The first few chapters are available to read [here on our blog](https://leboncanon.wordpress.com/). We appreciate the support of our fellow fanpeople!


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